Random blog posts about research in political communication, how people learn or don't learn from the media, why it all matters -- plus other stuff that interests me. It's my blog, after all. I can do what I want.

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Who Will Win?

It's early yet, but as far as I can tell few if any polling firms are asking my favorite presidential election horserace question -- who's gonna win?

UPDATED: I did find a CNN question that asks this recently.See bottom for details on Clinton vs Trump

This is different from asking a respondent who he or she supports.

Add those up, the aggregation of individual opinion, and you get what we generally define as public opinion. I'm talking about a related but very different question in which respondents are also asked who do they think will win. In other words, predict the outcome for me.

Why ask this? One, it's interesting and two, there's evidence this is better at predicting an election outcome than is the traditional asking of who people prefer. I'll discuss this later in the post. First, below are some of the question wordings, in parentheses the polling firm or sponsor that used it in the 2012 U.S. presidential election:

Just your best guess, who do you think will win the presidential election this year: Obama or Romney? (ABC/Washington Post)

Regardless of who you might support, who do you think is most likely to win the presidential election (Pew Research Center)

Regardless of whom you support, and trying to be as objective as possible, who do you think will win the election in November: Barack Obama or Mitt Romney? (CNN/ORC)

Below are the answers I could find from the 2012 election. My comments follow. Numbers are percent. I collapsed the Other/Unsure into a single category.

Obama Win

Romney Win

Other

November

CNN/ORC

57

36

7

ABC/WaPo

55

35

10

October

ABC/WaPo

57

33

10

Pew #1

52

30

18

Pew #2

48

31

19

September

ABC/WaPo

63

31

6

Pew

53

24

23

August

CNN/ORC

61

35

5

ABC/WaPo

56

37

8

July

ABC/WaPo

58

34

9

June

Pew

52

34

15

April

CNN/ORC

61

35

5

As you can see, at no point did people expect Romney to win. Sure, there are differences, such as Pew's higher "unsure" or "other" numbers, but the results are fairly consistent all the way back to April of 2012. Yes, in a few polls Romney closed the gap via the traditional "who will you vote for" question, but those polls were outliers (as the election itself proved) and there's a lot to be said for people's expectations.

Why?

First, lemme note that the two are highly correlated. People tend to believe their own candidate will win. There's even an academic name for it, called wishful thinking. Yes, there's research on it, and yes, I've published myself stuff on the phenomenon. But people also have a good sense of inevitability, and asking them to predict an outcome, although biased by their own predispositions and selective exposure to likeminded others, also has value in their sense of the opinion climate. In other words, they're often more truthful in predicting the outcome than they are in who they actually will vote for.

My own hunch -- this measures the private leanings of the unsure, the undecided, the ones not completely buying into one candidate or another. Yes, when asked for a preference they give one, but it appears to me when time comes to predict who will win, they tap something different. Something more honest, perhaps, or more accurate and reflective of what they'll do in the privacy of the ballot box.

As I said above, so far I've seen few Trump-Clinton questions (if any) posed this way, in part because Trump just captured the GOP nomination and Clinton remains tied up with Sanders. I figure after June 7 we'll see a few more, and then of course a flood of 'em once the convention season hits.

What does this tell us? The same poll, on preference pulled from PollingReport, had it Clinton 51 percent and Trump 41 percent, with 6 percent either saying "neither" or undecided. So what we have is Clinton adding 5 percentage points to her total on the "who's gonna win" question as compared to the "who ya for" question. I'll do more on this another day, but we know the predictive power of asking who is gonna win often tops the traditional presidential preference question. Yes, I know ... elections are by state, not national. I get that. But if's fun nonetheless.